Announced by the British Council’s chief executive Scott McDonald at Going Global 2025, the new strategy aims to strengthen the UK’s global transnational education engagement by promoting mutual benefit, supporting sustainable development, and fostering intercultural understanding.
“This strategy is the result of wide collaboration with UK and international partners and reaffirms our collective ambition: to ensure UK TNE continues to grow, diversify, and deliver impact – locally and globally, to shape connected, resilient, and equitable transnational education,” stated McDonald in a LinkedIn post.
TNE has so far been a success story for the UK in terms of sheer numbers, with over 650,000 students studying for UK degrees overseas in 2023/24 — a 7.8% increase from the previous year and nearly 10% average annual growth over the past five years, according to the British Council.
In fact, UK universities may soon have more students overseas than onshore, with notable gains in student numbers over the past five years in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, and the UAE, and rising demand in Vietnam, Nepal, Pakistan, and India.
This strategy… reaffirms our collective ambition: to ensure UK TNE continues to grow, diversify, and deliver impact
Scott McDonald, British Council
With more UK providers than ever offering TNE courses, the British Council aims to “enhance the UK tertiary education sector’s reputation for quality”, aligning with five key principles: high quality, strategic, partnership-led, student-centric, and inclusive.
Moreover, the 2025–27 strategy aims to impact the TNE sector across three levels – supporting system-level collaboration with governments, fostering strategic partnerships and program development for institutions, and enhancing student and alumni outcomes through the global Alumni UK network.
Driven by four key actions, the new strategy aims to strengthen data and insights, enable growth through policy reform and partnerships in collaboration with the UK International Education Champion and government departments, and showcase TNE’s role in advancing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The strategy will apply across all regions where the British Council operates, with countries such as India, China, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Vietnam, and the UAE already reporting progress under the four actions of the British Council’s 2023–25 TNE strategy.
